Women, Power, and Networks: The Gendered Politics of Economic Empowerment

Abstract

How are people empowered to engage in politics if they desire to do so? In addressing this broader inquiry, this dissertation zooms in on the question of what resources people have at their disposal to facilitate political engagement. Globally, there is a gender gap in political representation. Though this is not the case in every society, research on gender and politics reveals that in most countries, there is a gender gap in political leadership at local, state, and national levels. In Nigeria, Africa’s largest nation, women’s engagement in economic life, particularly around entrepreneurship, has steadily increased while political representation has been stagnant. My dissertation investigates this paradox by analyzing the relationship between women's economic empowerment and political behavior as women have been severely underrepresented in elected office but are very much present at voting polls and inter-electoral political life. I consider how women use economic and social resources to engage in politics in diverse ways. There are two main questions that drive the research agenda: What shapes variations in political behavior for men and women? Given the gender gap in political representation, how does economic power interact with social power to affect political behavior? To answer these questions, I use an interdisciplinary and multi-methodological approach to argue that social power moderates the relationship between economic power and political power, particularly in spaces of clientelist and patriarchal politicking. I demonstrate that economic power assembled via career success or access to financial resources does not necessarily translate into political empowerment for those interested in participating in the political arena. Rather, social power in the form of politically enabling networks (PENs) plays a significant role in conditioning political efficacy. PENs include vertical and horizontal relationships with family, mentors, sponsors, and peers that could induce political participation. Empirically, I employ participant observation with economic empowerment organizations led by Nigerian women, focus groups with entrepreneurs, semi-structured interviews with market association leaders, political aspirants and civil servants, and the analysis of data from Afrobarometer and an original survey experiment with over 1,300 respondents. Ultimately, my research contributes substantively to our understanding of the political economy of gender and development in Africa and beyond by critically interrogating the relationship between the economic, the social, and the political in the world’s largest Black nation.